Non-invasive photoelectric pulse oximetry has been previously described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,407,290, U.S. Pat. No. 4,266,554, U.S. Pat. No. 4,086,915, U.S. Pat. No. 3,998,550, U.S. Pat. No. 3,704,706, European Patent Application No. 102,816 published Mar. 13, 1984, European Patent Application No. 104,772 published Apr. 4, 1984, and European Patent Application No. 104,771 published Apr. 4, 1984. Pulse oximeters are commercially available from Nellcor Incorporated, Hayward, Calif., U.S.A., and are known as, for example, Pulse Oximeter Model N-100 (herein "N-100 oximeter").
Pulse oximeters typically measure and display various blood flow characteristics including but not limited to blood oxygen saturation of hemoglobin in arterial blood, volume of individual blood pulsations supplying the flesh, and the rate of blood pulsations corresponding to each heartbeat of the patient. The oximeters pass light through human or animal body tissue where blood perfuses the tissue such as a finger, an ear, the nasal septum or the scalp, and photoelectrically sense the absorption of light in the tissue. The amount of light absorbed is then used to calculate the amount of blood constituent being measured.
The light passed through the tissue is selected to be of one or more wavelengths that is absorbed by the blood in an amount representative of the amount of the blood constituent present in the blood. The amount of transmitted light passed through the tissue will vary in accordance with the changing amount of blood constituent in the tissue and the related light absorption.
For example, the N-100 oximeter is a microprocessor controlled device that measures oxygen saturation of hemoglobin using light from two light emitting diodes ("LED's"), one having a discrete frequency of about 660 nanometers in the red light range and the other having a discrete frequency of about 925 nanometers in the infrared range. The N-100 oximeter microprocessor uses a four-state clock to provide a bipolar drive current for the two LED's so that a positive current pulse drives the infrared LED and a negative current pulse drives the red LED to illuminate alternately the two LED's so that the incident light will pass through, e.g., a fingertip, and the detected or transmitted light will be detected by a single photodetector. The clock uses a high strobing rate, e.g., one thousand five hundred cycles per second, to be easily distinguished from other light sources. The photodetector current changes in response to the red and infrared light transmitted in sequence and is converted to a voltage signal, amplified, and separated by a two-channel synchronous detector--one channel for processing the red light waveform and the other channel for processing the infrared light waveform. The separated signals are filtered to remove the strobing frequency, electrical noise, and ambient noise and then digitized by an analog to digital converter ("ADC"). As used herein, incident light and transmitted light refers to light generated by the LED or other light source, as distinguished from ambient or environmental light.
The light source intensity may be adjusted to accomodate variations among patient's skin color, flesh thickness, hair, blood, and other variants. The light transmitted is thus modulated by the absorption of light in the variants, particularly the arterial blood pulse or pulsatile component, and is referred to as the plethysmograph waveform, or the optical signal. The digital representation of the optical signal is referred to as the digital optical signal. The portion of the digital optical signal that refers to the pulsatile component is labeled the optical pulse.
The detected digital optical signal is processed by the microprocessor of the N-100 oximeter to analyze and identify arterial pulses and to develop a history as to pulse periodicity, pulse shape, and determined oxygen saturation. The N-100 oximeter microprocessor decides whether or not to accept a detected pulse as corresponding to an arterial pulse by comparing the detected pulse against the pulse history. To be accepted, a detected pulse must meet certain predetermined criteria, for example, the expected size of the pulse, when the pulse is expected to occur, and the expected ratio of the red light to infrared light of the detected optical pulse in accordance with a desired degree of confidence. Identified individual optical pulses accepted for processing are used to compute the oxygen saturation from the ratio of maximum and minimum pulse levels as seen by the red wavelength compared to the maximum and minimum pulse levels as seen by the infrared wavelength.
Several alternate methods of processing and interpreting optical signal data have been disclosed in the patents and references cited above.
A problem with non-invasive pulse oximeters is that the plethysmograph signal and the optically derived pulse rate may be subject to irregular variants in the blood flow, including but not limited to motion artifact, that interfere with the detection of the blood flow characteristics. Motion artifact is caused by the patient's muscle movement proximate to the oximeter sensor, for example, the patient's finger, ear or other body part to which the oximeter sensor is attached, and may cause spurious pulses that are similar to pulses caused by arterial blood flow. These spurious pulses, in turn, may cause the oximeter to process the artifact waveform and provide erroneous data. This problem is particularly significant with infants, fetuses, or patients that do not remain still during monitoring.
A second problem exists in circumstances where the patient is in poor condition and the pulse strength is very weak. In continuously processing the optical data, it can be difficult to separate the true pulsatile component from artifact pulses and noise because of a low signal to noise ratio. Inability to reliably detect the pulsatile component in the optical signal may result in a lack of the information needed to calculate blood constituents.
It is well known that electrical heart activity occurs simultaneously with the heartbeat and can be monitored externally and characterized by the electrocardiogram ("ECG") waveform. The ECG waveform, as is known to one skilled in the art, comprises a complex waveform having several components that correspond to electrical heart activity. The QRS component relates to ventricular heart contraction. The R wave portion of the QRS component is typically the steepest wave therein, having the largest amplitude and slope, and may be used for indicating the onset of cardiovascular activity. The arterial blood pulse flows mechanically and its appearance in any part of the body typically follows the R wave of the electrical heart activity by a determinable period of time that remains essentially constant for a given patient. See, e.g., Goodlin et al., "Systolic Time Intervals in the Fetus and Neonate", Obstetrics and Gynecology, Vol. 39, No. 2, February 1972, where it is shown that the scalp pulse of fetuses lag behind the ECG "R" wave by 0.03-0.04 second, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,734,086.
In prior U.S. application Ser. No. 742,720, copending and commonly assigned, the disclosure (including the software appendix) of which is hereby expressly incorporated by reference, and in corresponding International PCT Application publication No. WO 86/05674 published Oct. 9, 1986, also commonly assigned, there is disclosed an invention for measuring the patient's heart activity and correlating it with the patient's detected blood flow signals to calculate more accurately the patient's oxygen saturation and pulse rate. The correlation includes auto- and cross correlation techniques to enhance the periodic information contained in each individual waveform as well as determine the time relationship of one waveform to another.
Correlating the occurrence of cardiovascular activity with the detection of arterial pulses occurs by measuring an ECG signal, detecting the occurrence of the R-wave portion of the ECG signal, determining the time delay by which an optical pulse in the detected optical signal follows the R-wave, and using the determined time delay between an R-wave and the following optical pulse so as to evaluate arterial blood flow only when it is likely to present a true blood pulse for waveform analysis. The measured time delay is used to determine a time window when, following the occurrence of an R-wave, the probability of finding an optical pulse corresponding to a true arterial pulse is high. The time window provides an additional criterion to be used in accepting or rejecting a detected pulse as an optical pulse. Any spurious pulses caused by motion artifact or noise occurring outside of that time window are typically rejected and are not used to calculate the amount of blood constituent. Correlating the ECG with the detected optical pulses thereby provided for more reliable measurement of oxygen saturation.
That application and publication refers to a modified N-100 oximeter (the "enhanced N-100 oximeter") whereby the device is provided with an additional heart activity parameter in the form of a detected R-wave from the patient's ECG waveform, in addition to the N-100 pulse oximeter functions, and the microprocessor is modified to include software and memory for controlling and processing the optical signal and heart activity information.
The additional heart activity parameter is independent of the detection of peripheral arterial pulses, e.g., ECG signals, ultrasound, ballistocardiogram, and maybe, accelerometers, nuclear magnetic resonators, electrical impedance techniques, and the like, and provides an identifiable and detectable signal in response to each heartbeat for use by the signal processing of the oximeter.
It is an object of this invention to provide for improved processing of the detected optical signal containing periodic information corresponding to arterial pulsatile blood flow and aperiodic information corresponding to noise, spurious signals, and motion artifact unrelated to the beating heart and arterial pulsatile blood flow, to improve further the reliability and accuracy of the determination of blood constituent, particularly oxygen saturation of hemoglobin by a non-invasive oximeter device.
It is another object of this invention to provide an improved method and apparatus for collecting successive portions of detected optical signals encompassing periodic information for more than one heartbeat and processing the collected portions to attenuate and filter therefrom aperiodic signal waveforms to provide enhanced periodic information from which the patient's blood constituent can be accurately determined.
It is another object to maintain the enhanced periodic information updated by continuing to add new portions of detected optical signals as they are obtained.
It is another object of this invention to create enhanced periodic information by collecting and processing successive portions of detected optical signals wherein the periodic information corresponding to the optical pulses have been added together in phase, synchronized to the occurrence of the patient's ECG and preferably the R-wave signal.
It is another object of this invention to add synchronized periodic information in a weighted fashion so that the most recent portion of detected optical signal is accorded a greater weight in the collected sum than any one prior portion of periodic information data.
It is another object of this invention to create the enhanced periodic information by adding together a predetermined number of the most recent successive portions of detected optical signal, whereby each portion corresponds to a heartbeat event and is given a weight according to its relative age so as to emphasise the newest information in the resultant weighted collective sum.
It is another object of this invention to correlate the periodic information with the ECG R-wave by using a waveform product technique to identify the occurrence of the heartbeat and the optical pulse corresponding to that heartbeat.
It is another object of this invention to evaluate the collected periodic information for a predetermined number of successive portions of the detected optical signal corresponding to a predetermined number of heartbeats in the frequency domain to obtain enhanced periodic information.
It is another object of this invention to Fourier transform a time-measure of detected optical signals including periodic information for N heartbeats to determine the relative maxima at the fundamental frequency N and the minima at the zero frequency for use in determining the light modulation ratio for the amount of blood constituents.
It is another object of this invention to correlate the Fourier Transform of the time-measure of detected optical signals with the Fourier Transform of a time-measure of the ECG signal, and more particularly the R-wave events of the ECG signal, to determine the maxima at the fundamental heart frequency.
It is another object of this invention to correlate the periodic information in a time-measure of the detected optical signal with a time-measure of the detected heart activity, preferably in the form of the ECG signal and more preferably in the form of the R-wave of the ECG signal, to define a predetermined number of samples in a data set and use frequency domain analysis techniques to evaluate the collected predetermined number of sample data sets to determine the relative maxima at the fundamental frequency.